The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.

There are some days when I think I’m going to die from an overdose of satisfaction.

I always like to look on the optimistic side of life, but I am realistic enough to know that life is a complex matter.

It is the quality of the moment, not the number of days, or events, or of actors, that imports.

The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.

Each day provides its own gifts.

An employer of mine back in the ’80s was kind enough to take me on after a rough patch, and it made a big difference in my life that I knew I was the sort of person who showed up on time. It’s a basic tell of character.

Life is a song to me.

An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while a pessimist sees only the red stoplight… the truly wise person is colorblind.

When you practice gratefulness, there is a sense of respect toward others.

Faith indeed tells what the senses do not tell, but not the contrary of what they see. It is above them and not contrary to them.

When I think over what I have said, I envy dumb people.

I did not, thank the Lord, have to have a hysterectomy.

Zappa was very technical and impressed by things that were musically challenging – weird time signatures, strange keys, awkward chord sequences. Zappa was important to me as an example of everything I didn’t want to do. I’m very grateful to him, actually.

If you have the opportunity to play this game of life you need to appreciate every moment. A lot of people don’t appreciate the moment until it’s passed.

Beethoven can write music, thank God, but he can do nothing else on earth.

Life would be tolerable but for its amusements.

Every man in his lifetime needs to thank his faults.

I know that I came into the world with what I call ‚big dharma‘ – with a blueprint to teach self-reliance and a positive loving approach to large numbers of people all over the globe. I am ever so grateful for the circumstances of my life that allowed me to be pretty much left alone and to develop as I was so intended in this incarnation.

Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.

Nothing is to be rated higher than the value of the day.

All my adult life people have been helping me.

When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour. That’s relativity.

Everything that we see is a shadow cast by that which we do not see.

The hardest thing to see is what is in front of your eyes.

I stayed focused, and I never surrendered, and now I’ve been blessed. now I take care of my mother, my father, and my entire whole family.

You don’t get paid for the hour. You get paid for the value you bring to the hour.

Remember that the happiest people are not those getting more, but those giving more.

We have communion with Christ in His thoughts, views, and purposes; for His thoughts are our thoughts according to our capacity and sanctity. Believers take the same view of matters as Jesus does; that which pleases Him pleases them, and that which grieves His grieves them also.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories – and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

If my world were to cave in tomorrow, I would look back on all the pleasures, excitements and worthwhilenesses I have been lucky enough to have had. Not the sadness, not my miscarriages or my father leaving home, but the joy of everything else. It will have been enough.

My greatest blessing has been the birth of my son. My next greatest blessing has been my ability to turn people into children of mine.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

History is more or less bunk.

It’s possible – you can never know – that the universe exists only for me. If so, it’s sure going well for me, I must admit.

That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep.

It seemed the world was divided into good and bad people. The good ones slept better while the bad ones seemed to enjoy the waking hours much more.

It is only when the rich are sick that they fully feel the impotence of wealth.

The older I get, the better I understand that every day is a gift.

Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, it’s a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope, and that enables you to laugh at life’s realities.

I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant, and kindness from the unkind; yet, strange, I am ungrateful to those teachers.

The time to worrying about flying is when you’re on the ground. When you’re up in the air, it’s too late. No point in worrying about it then.

I’m too busy acting like I’m not Naive. I’ve seen it all, I was here first.

For my part, I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself.

Nothing is further than earth from heaven, and nothing is nearer than heaven to earth.

Remember happiness doesn’t depend upon who you are or what you have; it depends solely on what you think.

I don’t feel we did wrong in taking this great country away from them. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.

The wide world is all about you: you can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence it out.

It is normal to give away a little of one’s life in order not to lose it all.

The only passion that guides me is for the truth… I look at everything from this point of view.

It’s a tragedy, in a way, that Americans are brought up to think that they cannot feel for other people and other beings just because they are different. They think they’re different. It’s very limiting.

On a bike, being just slightly above pedestrian and car eye level, one gets a perfect view of the goings-on in one’s own town.

Fear keeps us focused on the past or worried about the future. If we can acknowledge our fear, we can realize that right now we are okay. Right now, today, we are still alive, and our bodies are working marvelously. Our eyes can still see the beautiful sky. Our ears can still hear the voices of our loved ones.

I think we have to own the fears that we have of each other, and then, in some practical way, some daily way, figure out how to see people differently than the way we were brought up to.

You’re dead if you aim only for kids. Adults are only kids grown up, anyway.

It’s not what you pay a man, but what he costs you that counts.

Your ordinary acts of love and hope point to the extraordinary promise that every human life is of inestimable value.

We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

I conceive that the great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by false estimates they have made of the value of things.

The greatest enemy of any one of our truths may be the rest of our truths.

A physician is not angry at the intemperance of a mad patient, nor does he take it ill to be railed at by a man in fever. Just so should a wise man treat all mankind, as a physician does his patient, and look upon them only as sick and extravagant.